A kill switch for the kill switch?

Columbia law professor Eben Moglen (below) has taken my idea for decentralizing the internet, made it real, and improved upon it. If his proposed “freedom box” works as advertised, each internet user could soon have his own server, with the effect that the small number of very large principal ISPs serving the U.S. will no longer present a choke-point that could permit the government or some other powerful entity to “shut off” the internet.

Terrorism

Wars

Iraq War

In a time when the United States — and most of the rest of the world — is controlled by an amoral, pathocratic elite, and the real war is on between that elite and the rest of humanity, any measure that diffuses control of essential public services is a step forward. Since power concentrated is power corrupted, our object must always be to spread power as widely as possible. And this proposed device — to the best knowledge of this non-technician — seems like precisely the sort of mechanism that can help to achieve such diffusion.

Originally published as a review of a New York Times article on Eben Moglen’s potentially liberating invention.